On March 2, Lei Jun, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Xiaomi (小米), published an article on his official WeChat account to report the latest progress of the company's robotics business: Xiaomi robots have begun "internships" at its automobile factories.
Lei Jun mentioned that based on the general-purpose VLA foundation model Xiaomi-Robotics-0, combined with multi-modal perception capabilities and reinforcement learning technology, Xiaomi's humanoid robot has initially achieved autonomous work in scenarios such as the self-tapping nut loading station and material box handling. Key metrics, including Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and single-task success rates, are steadily improving. Actual deployment and verification surrounding more classic workstations are also continuously advancing.
"There is a huge, hard-to-cross chasm for robot operations moving from the laboratory to a real factory—production takt. When exploring technology in the lab, you can exchange 10,000 failures for one success; but in a real factory, you must achieve a 100% success rate across 10,000 tasks to meet production requirements," Lei Jun stated. He added that while the robots might still look a bit "clumsy" right now, this is indeed a very meaningful beginning.
Lei Jun expressed, "Xiaomi will continue to contribute its strength to promote the large-scale application of general-purpose humanoid robots in intelligent manufacturing. I predict that within the next 5 years, a large number of humanoid robots will enter Xiaomi factories to work."